Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-153).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-125).

Alcohol related harm is one of the major public health and societal concerns in the UK. Per capita alcohol consumption has risen considerably over the last twenty years and binge drinking has increased. Alcohol related harms including crime and social disorder, lost productivity, family breakdown and health harms such as rising incidence of liver disease and increases in alcohol related hospital admissions, are considerable. Particular concern has focused upon alcohol and young people, with levels of youth binge drinking in the UK among the highest in Europe and alcohol related hospital admissions of young people increasing. Furthermore, youth drinking behaviours are strong predictors of alcohol dependence in later life and contribute to long term health harms. As a result there has been an increased focus on factors that may potentially influence youth drinking behaviours including alcohol marketing. The evidence base on the impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking has developed since the topic was first examined in the early 1980s. Recent systematic reviews have suggested a causal link between alcohol marketing and youth drinking behaviour. However gaps in the evidence base remain. The research project presented in this PhD contains six publications which aim to address these gaps, being the first longitudinal consumer study on the impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking in the UK. The study used a critical social marketing framework to assess the cumulative impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking, with findings intended to help upstream social marketing efforts, inform policy and regulation and targeted behaviour change interventions. The project examined the impact of alcohol marketing across a comprehensive range of communications channels including less well researched areas such as new media and sponsorship. The project involved three discrete stages of research. First, a brand website and press audit of contemporary alcohol marketing communications in the UK was conducted, supplemented by interviews with key informants from the marketing profession and regulatory bodies. Second, qualitative focus group research was conducted with young people to explore the role and meaning of alcohol in their lives and their attitudes towards alcohol marketing. Third, a two wave cohort study design featuring a questionnaire survey was conducted to assess the impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking. The survey consisted of a two part interviewer administered and self completion questionnaire in home with 920 second year school pupils at baseline, and follow up of a cohort of 552 in fourth year. The audit revealed that alcohol marketing is ubiquitous in the UK with most brands having a dedicated website featuring sophisticated content that appeals to youth including music, sport and video games. The press audit found that alcopop brands concentrated advertising in youth magazines, and that supermarket advertising of alcohol was considerable in the printed press. Focus group research revealed a sophisticated level of awareness of and involvement in alcohol marketing among respondents across several channels. Marketing activities often featuring content with youth appeal seemed to influence young people’s well developed brand attitudes. Cross sectional regression analysis found significant associations between awareness of, and involvement with alcohol marketing and drinking status and future drinking intentions. Bivariate and multi-variate longitudinal analysis indicated that alcohol marketing was associated with youth drinking behaviour, including initiation of drinking, and increased frequency of drinking between wave one and wave two. The implications of these findings for theory, practice and public policy are discussed.

Cultural mapping is a technique in the field of conservation that is currently gaining popularity. Cultural maps provide a means to better understand an area and produce easily understood documentation of an area’s tangible and intangible cultural assets. These serve as an inventory for the local knowledge and resources of an area. As cities continue to grow and develop, it becomes ever more important to document local traditions and historical sites before they disappear and are forgotten. Cultural mapping provides the means to do this. As the field of cultural heritage conservation has emerged and evolved in Hong Kong, numerous aspects of this city’s heritage and culture have been examined. These have included analyses of Hong Kong’s market culture, temples, food culture, architectural styles and local traditions. One aspect, however, that has been somewhat ignored is Hong Kong’s drinking culture. This is an unfortunate oversight since through the analysis of an area’s drinking culture, a greater understanding of an area as a whole can be achieved. Lockhart Road has a history spanning eighty years and throughout this history it has had a reputation as an entertainment centre. A key feature of this entertainment has involved the consumption of alcohol. In a city such as Hong Kong that has witnessed much change over the last century, it is intriguing to find an area with such continuity in its tradition. It is on account of this that Lockhart Road is an appropriate study area in order to better understand Hong Kong’s drinking culture. This dissertation will focus on 20-86 Lockhart Road as its case study. The purpose is to analyse the area in order to understand its history and evolution, establish its tangible and intangible features, highlight the role and impact of drinking culture and thoroughly document the area to help in making decisions about its future and serve as a model for other similar studies. / published_or_final_version / Conservation / Master / Master of Science in Conservation

Introduction Suicidality and excessive alcohol use are both important public health issues. Various risk factors including alcoholism have been studied and identified to be associated with suicidality. Increasing evidence has shown that excessive alcohol use is associated with a wide range of physical and mental health issues. There is a lack of local study to study the association between alcohol consumption and suicidality in details including the association of different patterns of alcohol use with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The aim of this study is to study the association between alcohol use and suicidality, taking into account of possible differences between different pattern of alcohol use and various possible confounding factors. Methods This study was based on analysis of data collected in Population Health Survey (PHS) conducted in 2003/04, which was conducted by the Department of Health (HKSAR) and the Department of Community Medicine (HKU). A total of 5600 respondents between the age of 18 to 64 were included in this study. The primary outcome was current suicidal ideation. Association between history of suicidal attempt with the other variables was also studied. The primary predictors variables included alcohol-related variables (presence of drinking, age of first drink, type of drink, amount of drinking, presence of binge drinking), history of mental illness (self-reported known history of depression, anxiety disorder and schizophrenia), level of depression and anxiety (STAI and CES-D scores), quality of life (WHOQOL-BREF score), exercises, stress management and various demographic variables including age, sex, place of birth, marital status, education level and income level. Logistic regression was used to analyze the association between suicidality and alcohol use. Results The prevalence of lifetime history of suicidal attempts is 5.1% in this population. 17.3% has lifetime history of suicidal ideations, 1.3% has a suicidal attempt in the past 1 year and 11.9% have suicidal ideations in the past one week. Being divorced or separated, being female, being a smoker, considering themselves having need for emotional support, having more severe depressive symptoms, having chronic diseases, depression and anxiety disorder were associated with presence of a history of suicidal attempt. The presence of current suicidal ideations was found to be associated with more severe depressive symptoms, poorer quality of life as reflected by a lower physical domain score of WHOQOL-BREF, being single, having history of binge drinking, having recent suicidal thoughts and lifetime history f suicidal thought. The presence of alcohol drinking and larger amount of alcohol intake were not shown to be significantly associated with presence of suicidal ideations and behaviors in the binary logistic regression models. Only the association between presence of current suicidal ideation and binge drinking was shown to be statistically significant. Conclusion This study did not find a strong association between alcohol consumption and suicidality. Among the alcohol-related variables, only binge drinking was found to be statistically significantly associated with current suicidal ideations. Further study to further explore association between alcohol and suicidality should be considered. / published_or_final_version / Public Health / Master / Master of Public Health

Social norms play a pivotal role in both explaining the development and maintenance of collegiate alcohol use and creating prevention and intervention programs targeted at reducing heavy drinking. By theoretically functioning as a model of normative and popular behavior, descriptive and injunctive norms are consistently associated with college drinking. In the current study, we endeavored to test the mechanisms through which social norms influence drinking by experimentally manipulating normative beliefs. Participants (N = 181) were assigned to one of nine conditions in a 3 (descriptive norms (DN): positive, negative, none) x 3 (injunctive norms (IN): positive, negative, none) experimental design. Norms exposure occurred within a series of three same-gender Internet-based chat room sessions. The norms manipulation was partially successful in creating groups with distinct normative beliefs, with the no norms groups failing to maintain a neutral norm for both descriptive and injunctive norms. Consequently, no descriptive norms groups were combined with positive descriptive norms groups and no injunctive norms groups were combined with negative injunctive norms groups, resulting in a 2 (DN: positive, negative) x 2 (IN: positive, negative) design for analyses. Overall findings for type (DN, IN) and valence (positive, negative) of norms indicated that participants globally reduced descriptive norms and drinking from pre-chat room to post-chat room, regardless of the type or valence of the manipulation, indicating that there were no experimental effects by condition. Whereas drinking appeared to stabilize at post-chat room, descriptive norms continued to decrease by three-month follow-up. Injunctive norms and personal attitudes about alcohol use also decreased by three-month follow-up. Although we were unsuccessful in changing normative beliefs in expected directions, these findings have important implications for college prevention and intervention programs for reducing drinking. The lack of experimental effects suggested that changing norms may be more complex than previously hypothesized and that changes in norms may not result in changes in drinking, which is the purported mechanism of change in norms-based interventions. These results further suggested that continued research is necessary to provide empirical support for a causal link between norms and drinking and that alternative explanations for the association between norms and drinking need to be considered. / text

Control de calidad sensorial de bebidas alcohólicas utilizando rápidos sensores químicosEn la presente tesis Doctoral, han sido aplicados dos sensores artificiales para el análisis debebidas alcohólicas: la nariz electrónica basada en la espectrometría de masas (MS) y la lenguaelectrónica basada en la espectroscopía infrarroja con transformada de Fourier (FTIR). Elpropósito fue desarrollar nuevas estrategias para analizar la autenticidad de estos productos,desde un punto de vista sensorial, por medio de técnicas las espectrales antes mencionadas.Adicionalmente, ha sido utilizado un espectrofotómetro UV-visible como ojo electrónico. Eltrabajo presentado pretende ser un avance significativo hacia el desarrollo de un catadorelectrónico mediante la fusión de los tres sensores químicos: nariz electrónica, lenguaelectrónica y ojo electrónico.Sensory quality control of alcoholic beverages using fast chemical sensorsIn the present Doctoral Thesis, two chemical artificial sensors are applied to the analysis ofalcoholic beverages: the Mass Spectrometry (MS)-based electronic-noses and Fouriertransform infrared (FTIR)-based electronic-tongue. The aim was developing new strategies totest the authenticity of these products, from a sensory point of view, by means of the spectraltechniques above mentioned. Additionally, has been used an UV-visible spectrophotometer aselectronic eye. The work presented wants to be a significant advance towards the developmentof an electronic taster through the fusion of three chemical sensors: electronic nose, electronictongue and electronic eye.

No description available.

The focus of the study was to examine the extent to which pharmacies in Indiana are currently selling cigarettes and alcohol, the current opinions of pharmacists, to compare findings with the previous 1996 Indiana study and to determine pharmacists' familiarity with available public health resources. A survey questionnaire was designed based on previous studies. It was reviewed by a jury of experts and subsequently administered to the randomly selected pharmacies in Indiana. Of those pharmacies that were included in the study, 74.4% were returned. Collected data were analyzed and compared to findings from 1996 using descriptivestatistical methods.Findings revealed that fewer pharmacies sold cigarettes in 2001 (58.1%) than in 1996 (63.7%). Alcohol sales continued at 206 (43.7%) of pharmacies currently selling alcoholic beverages, which is relatively the same level as in 1996, 202 (41.9%) of pharmacies. There is an increasing trend in pharmacists that believe pharmacies should be selling neither cigarettes (+7.2%) nor alcohol (+4.7). Most pharmacists' (64%) agree that they play asignificant role in health promotion/disease prevention to the public, yet only 42.6% involve themselves with publichealth promotion activities. The capability of pharmacists to refer people to outside resources for educational needsis limited. Over three-fourths of pharmacists are either completely unfamiliar with or have no opinion about thethree most well-funded public health programs in the state of Indiana. / Department of Physiology and Health Science

The purpose of this research study was to examine the effects of consumption of beverages (caffeinated and alcoholic) and physical activity on the frequency and severity of hot flashes in peri-menopausal, menopausal, and post-menopausal women by conducting an on-line survey of women over the age of 40 employed at a Midwestern University. One-hundred ninety-six women participated in this study. Majority of participants were age 50-59 (n=104, 53.1%), and were in the naturally post-menopausal reproductive stage (n=81, 41.3%). Overall, results revealed that the effects of self-reported physical activity, average daily caffeine and alcohol intake were not significant in predicting the frequency of hot flashes (R2=.043, F(6, 184) = 1.39, p= .221). However, results revealed a small, but statistically significant effect of physical activity, caffeine, and alcohol intake on severity of hot flashes (R2=.068, F(6,180) = 2.195, p = .046). Additionally, relatively more participation in aerobic physical activity increased frequency of hot flashes (p= .031); while higher intensity of aerobic physical activity had an inverse relationship on both frequency and severity of hot flashes (p=.011, p=.003, respectively). / Department of Family and Consumer Sciences